Share this:

An enlarged rendering displayed at a Concord Community Reuse Project Community Workshop on Sept. 23, 2017 suggests opportunities to weave historic elements from the former naval weapons station into a 2,300-acre redevelopment project to include homes, schools, retail and tournament sports facilities.

Imagine you’re Concord, grinding your way through the dry due diligence — reports, studies, community input — related to the development of 5,000 acres at the shuttered naval weapons station that used to call your city home. It’s a lot of work, but worth it, right? After all, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Like the Concord Transcript Facebook page for neighborhood news and conversation from Concord and beyond.

Then one day, after years of shepherding this dream toward reality, and two years (give or take) before the first shovel is stuck in the ground, you get a call from Amazon seeking a suitable site on which to plop down its second world headquarters. How do you feel about two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities?

That poser certainly enlivened Saturday’s third Concord Community Reuse Project Community Workshop. Some attendees knew of the Amazon entreaty. Not all of them realized Concord had decided to enter into a regional partnership to earn Amazon’s business.

“(Amazon) said, ‘Here’s what we want, you guys have until Oct. 19 to tell us how you’re going to do it,’ ” said Guy Bjerke, Concord’s director of community reuse planning. “One of the things they said was, ‘We only want one bid per metropolitan statistical area.’ ”

What Amazon wants is a facility of 1 million square feet, with room to grow, over 10 years, to around 8 million square feet. Amazon also wants proximity to transit, a tech talent pool, and local colleges and universities. It cast a wide net, sending feelers to nine big cities across the United States, including San Jose and Oakland.

Get tech news in your inbox weekday mornings. Sign up for the free Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter.

The ticklish dilemma that could cause for Concord, Bjerke said, “then we’d be fighting with Oakland. Whose bid gets it? So that’s why we decided to partner on the bid.”

That said: “We think this Concord site works all by itself,” Bjerke said. “We think we can give (Amazon) exactly what they want, something they can design from scratch because we’re in this process right now. But we’re being good regional partners in the pursuit of this. So we’re partnering with San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond and Fremont, which all have good sites, so that we could potentially get Amazon to maybe distribute themselves along a BART line and put some of their office workers in different spots.”

It’s a dizzying prospect. Equally dizzying is that Amazon wants an RFP (Request For Proposal) by Oct. 19. That’s a lot of work to be completed in less than one month.

It was announced Saturday that BART has expressed interest in having 18 acres of the North Concord Station integrated into the development. Ian Griffiths, a senior planner at BART, noted the transit agency is involved in a dozen transit-oriented developments (seven permitted, five under construction). The TOD model conforms to the vision of first-phase developer Lennar.

“Concord is lucky to have two BART stations,” said Rachel Flynn of FivePoint, a California real-estate developer, which is managing the project for Lennar. “North Concord is one of the least used. That’s going to change.”

BART would select the developer, Bjerke told an audience at the Concord Senior Center. Bjerke also said that the Coast Guard wishes to sell the 58 inland acres of abandoned housing along East Olivera Road, making it available to be developed.

Flynn also broke some news, announcing — surprise! — it was discovered that an active oil pipeline runs along the southwest border of the sprawling property, parallel to the Bishop Estates and Dana Estates neighborhoods. Since schools cannot be built within 1,500 feet of such a pipeline, some planned schools might have to be relocated.

Gary Peterson is a sports content creator for the Bay Area News Group. His prior assignments included 31 years as a sports columnist, serving as a general assignment news reporter, covering courts and writing a metro column before finding his way back to sports.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's real estate company routinely filed false documents as it pushed vulnerable tenants out of its apartment buildings, according to a new Associated Press report that adds to the business scandals complicating Kushner's role in his father-in-law's administration